Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v5.djvu/256

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240
SPEECHES
[Sept. 17

that if they would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, they must go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thundered its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the love of liberty; but until they did these things, and others eloquently enumerated by him, they could not repress all tendencies to ultimate emancipation.

I ask attention to the fact that in a preëminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work: blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a m,an, but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile; that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents. I suggest to this portion of the Ohio Republicans, or Democrats, if there be any present, the serious consideration of this fact, that there is now going on among you a steady process of debauching public opinion on this subject. With this, my friends, I bid you adieu.

"A Shot over the Line."

An Address to Kentuckians on Douglas's Fallacies, Delivered at Cincinnati, Ohio. September 17, 1859.

My Fellow-citizens of the State of Ohio: This is the first time in my life that I have appeared before an audience in so great a city as this. I therefore—though I am no longer a young man